It’s not about hope it’s about planning

I have a goal to acquire 1,000 subscribers prior to my next coaching call in my writing course. I’ve only hit 265 so far.
With the call being five days away, am getting resourceful. I’m going to reach far and wide to hit the goal. Call in chips that I otherwise wouldn’t have.
Now, I didn’t set negative consequences if I missed the goal from the outset so perhaps I would have worked with more intensity from day one now that we’re approaching the goal.
But had I said “if I don’t hit this goal, I’ll give a charity I despise $1,000”, I would have worked with more fire. Imagine if I would have upped the ante and made it $5,000.
Now imagine if I made it $10,000 to the American Nazi party or ISIS or something horrible like that (thanks Tim Ferris for those recommendations).
Not that I’d do it but you get the point.
Yes, subscribers are important to me but they apparently aren’t important to “burn my boats and take the fucking island”.
I will make them so on the next one!
So the question is, how bad do you want your goal? What price are you willing to pay for it?

Measure and Report Goals And Have Someone Unbiased Hold You Accountable

“What you measure, you improve. What you report, you accelerate.” — Legendary Management Expert Peter Drucker

Having to report to someone else who doesn’t care for you personally creates a healthy fear that spurs action. This is the exact purpose of board meetings and goals set at each one.
Others holding you accountable don’t see all your hard work that give you moral high ground to miss, they just look at the results. So it forces you to be results oriented.
At the beginning of our start up, our seed investor who put up our first $500k had us do calls with him every two weeks.
I’d have to wake up for them every other Friday at 6am because I was based in San Francisco and he was on the East Coast.
We’d send a deck with activity updates and goals — and every one of us would show up for a meeting to talk about our activity.
This did two things:
When you’re live with an authority, you tend to make bolder goals and when you know you have to report them to everyone, you can bet you go out of your way to follow through.
Now that we’ve stopped those meetings as we’ve progressed through that incubation period with that investor, I’ve noticed a significant drop in urgency.
We haven’t written goals down and we don’t go to sleep every night knowing we’re reporting them in front of the tribe every other Friday morning.
Real force functions work and having an objective, results only oriented person hold you accountable is critical to achieve results and grow quickly.

Get Outside Help With Someone Who Has Achieved What You Want To Achieve
“Never take advice from someone you wouldn’t trade places with.” — Darren Hardy
To that end, get coached by someone who has achieved your goal. Only take advice from someone who you’d trade places with.
That ensures the decisions you make as a result of their advice comes from the right place. There are too many teachers who think they know what to do because of study though don’t know how to teach it when it matters because they only know the knowledge or material or don’t have the deep experience required to transfer their mastery over to you.
That’s why I think the best psychologists are entrepreneurs or winning marketers, not often psychologists themselves.
Entrepreneurs and marketers have to deeply understand what makes a human being tick to act, and what motivates them to spend hard earned money, have employees work for them for years, rely on them and more.
They have lead people when it matters and got them to buy things with a lot on the line.
The average practitioner whether it’s a psychologist or medical doctor or lawyer has generally been risk averse which is what led them down that traditional path in the first place.
They often haven’t put themselves out there in a way that exposes themselves to people and situations to deeply understand the trials, tribulations and challenges people go through and the complexity of the self that comes with it.
This is of course not all black and white and not to say doctors and psychologists can’t be entrepreneurs but thinking about the traditional path from college to practitioners to make a point (which most of them would agree with me on).

Reality
It’s important to establish reality because what oftentimes happens is we get inspired to “go-go-go!” while forgetting (or avoiding) to take an inventory of what’s likely, what isn’t, and why. In other words, we make decisions without a complete picture of reality. That’s why establishing reality is so important: to get clear on what’s working, what isn’t, and outline an effective strategy for moving forward. By clarifying your reality, you identify your beliefs, incentives, and obstacles that help and hinder—and awareness is half the battle.

Questions to unearth current reality:
* How does [the situation] affect you? How does it affect others?
* What’s the cost to you physically, mentally, and emotionally of continuing down this path?
* On a scale of 1 to 10, where would you rate yourself now? What number do you want to be at?
* How might you be contributing to the problem?
*

Options (And Obstacles)
When you’re falling from the sky, you only see one thing: earth. The first time my parachute didn’t open (not to be confused with the second, third, or fourth times, of course), the only thing I could think about as I plummeted to earth was one thing :

“FUUUUUUCK!!”

The point is, if you keep your head buried below the surface then all you see is dirt. That’s why you need to identify your options because they do exist.

You just have to look for them.

This is where a coach comes in—to help you identify options “above the surface” that you might not have seen otherwise because your nose was too buried in dirt.

Questions to discover your options:
* Who might you ask for help?
* What have you tried in the past? What has worked and what hasn’t?
* What might be three ways to resolve this challenge/achieve your goal?

Will
It’s all come full circle now. At this point, you’ve established your goal, identified reality, and explored options and obstacles. Now it’s time to put up or shut up and commit to next steps. The previous steps mean nothing if you’re not willing to put the pedal to the metal and make shit happen.

Questions to unearth personal will:
* What will you do now?
* What are you willing to commit to?
* When can I follow up with you on this?

You can apply the GROW model to your team:
(G) What’s the goal of this team? What does it want to accomplish and by what date?
(R) Where are we currently? What has to happen in order to achieve our goal?
(O) What are our options and what obstacles might be in our way? (and how might we overcome them?
(W) What is everybody willing to do to 1) hold each other accountable and 2) hold the team accountable?

Even apply the GROW model to your meetings:
(G) What’s the goal of this meeting?
(R) Is 30 minutes really enough time, or do we need more? What’s working for us and what isn’t?
(O) How might we make this meeting better (and what does “better” look like?—this circles back to your goal)? What resources do we have at our disposal?
(W) Is everybody willing to commit to showing up on time and not playing on their phones during the meeting?